Our bunfight and their war

How strong is your stomach? Compared with the events unfolding in global politics, Australia's domestic uproar over boat people is no more than a neurotic little ideological skirmish.

As this was being written, the Bush Administration was absorbing new evidence that Saddam Hussein has not only had links with the al-Qaeda terrorist network for years but is still ardently preparing to strike Israel with weapons of mass destruction. "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," the chief of German intelligence, August Hanning, told the The New Yorker two weeks ago.

Saddam pursues this goal with wide encouragement. Even his enemy, the former president of Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said in a speech at the Tehran University on December 14 that global politics would soon change when there is an Islamic bomb.

"On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world," said Rafsanjani, who described Israel as "the most hideous historic occurrence" and declared the Islamic world would "vomit her out of its midst".

And Rafsanjani is supposed to be a moderate. Yesterday, Israeli military forces had occupied Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Ramallah and Bethlehem. At the time of writing, the Church of the Nativity was still surrounded by Israeli tanks and filled with Palestinian gunmen.");document.write("

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It's all connected. This war of blood, attrition, ideology and propaganda is going to lead to more human dislocation and more moral dilemmas. The outer rings of the human dislocation ripple through Australian politics. Yesterday, 11 people were still at large after escaping from the Woomera detention centre over the Easter weekend, courtesy of a group of demonstrators.

Of the 50 detainees who originally escaped, 48 had had their application for refugee status formally rejected; 23 were appealing adverse decisions by the Refugee Review Tribunal; eight had exhausted all legal remedies and were facing deportation. Six of those still at large are Afghans and five are Iranians. But some who claim to be Afghan refugees arrive without travel documents and turn out to be citizens of Pakistan.

There are other problems. Earlier this year, a former member of Saddam's personal guard was released from Woomera despite strenuous attempts by the Government to deport him because of the role played by the personal guard in war crimes and torture. After his request for asylum was rejected by the Immigration Department and the Refugee Review Tribunal, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruled that he could seek refuge in Australia even though he had destroyed identification documents.

In the past the Government has also identified several former members of Khad, the Afghan secret police, who sought to enter Australia as refugees. In other words, none of the boat people at large had been found, thus far, to be credible asylum seekers, which is why they have been in detention for prolonged periods. Yet those who fled Woomera are automatically referred to as refugees by their advocates. They need compassion, but they could just as easily be referred to as liars. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.

This was obvious yesterday morning at the Senate Select Committee into the children overboard affair. Labor senators spent the first 40 minutes complaining that the committee's terms of reference were too broad, and this had allowed a large volume of evidence to be presented about the scores of boat children who had ended up in the water and in danger as a result of their vessels being scuttled or sabotaged in the months before last year's federal election.

That was not supposed to happen. These hearings were designed to humiliate the former defence minister, Peter Reith, and wound or even kill off the legitimacy of the Man Who Will Not Die, John Howard.

It's a small part of the much bigger picture, the war of blood and the war of propaganda. It's not even a battle of ideas. One of the most elaborate hoaxes rotating around world opinion is that hundreds of thousands of children have died in Iraq as a result of US-enforced sanctions. This is pure fantasy. Sanctions have never prohibited or limited the import of medicine. Under the highly successful food-for-oil program, the United Nations has actually urged Iraqi to import more basic medicines, but Baghdad has refused, preferring to use suffering children as propaganda.

It remains remarkable how many progressives are willing to appease Saddam. Thanks are due to a remarkable piece of reporting by Jeffrey Goldberg, of The New Yorker, who went into Iraq despite a bounty on the head of foreign journalists placed by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service. His expose of Saddam's genocidal past and genocidal plans was published in the March 25 issue of The New Yorker.

Goldberg found that the chemical warfare conducted by Saddam against the Kurdish minority in Iraq was far more extensive and damaging than realised by the outside world; that Iraqi intelligence has had more links with al-Qaeda than previously thought; that Saddam is a prime supporter of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, paying $US10,000 ($18,850) to the families of each "martyr" who makes a suicide attack; that Iraq deploys agents who trained in al-Qaeda camps; and that his Mukhabarat has maintained links with al-Qaeda since 1992. A program of "nationality correction" - wiping out Kurdish identity - is robust and ongoing; Iraq still has tonnes of nerve agent and other toxins; Iraq has created weapons using anthrax; and the Kurds were used as target practice for the main event - an attack on Israel that will make Saddam the new Saladin.

It's not exactly a secret. At the Arab summit in Cairo in October 2000, the vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Iraq, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, said: "Jihad alone is capable of liberating Palestine and the rest of the Arab territories occupied by dirty Jews in their distorted Zionist entity."

Innocence is in short supply among the main players in this saga. Israel has compounded its increasingly isolated position with a territorial intransigence summarised by Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books last September: "At the end of 1993 there were some 116,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza ... There were about some 200,000 settlers at the beginning of the second intifada in late September 2000 ... The Palestinians consider some 210,000 Jews in greater Jerusalem as settlers and consider there are a total of about 410,000 Israeli settlers ... Over 40 per cent of the population of settlements is employed by the state ... The rate of unemployment in the settlements is close to zero.

"In the Gaza Strip the ratio is 1.2 million Palestinians to 6500 settlers, who nevertheless control 40 per cent of the Gaza Strip beaches ... The settlements, with approximately 10 per cent of the West Bank population, use some 37 per cent of the West Bank water ... Even worse is the situation in the Gaza Strip, where the per capita ratio of water distribution for the Israeli settlers and the Palestinians is seven to one ...

"Israelis on both the Left and the Right are talking these days about 'separation' from the Palestinians ... The Left and Right differ over where to draw the line but both sides envision that the line will be made of concrete and steel ...

"One has to remember that [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon, more than anyone else, was the prime mover in building existing settlements as the minister in charge of the occupied territories in the Begin and Shamir governments. That the settlements are illegal under international law is not in doubt to any of the 142 members of the UN, except for Israel ..."

Israel's position is clarified by this report in the The New York Times yesterday based on interviews with four of the top five leaders in Hamas, the group orchestrating the suicide attacks inside Israel:

"'Our spirit is high, our mood is good,' said Ismail Abu Shanab, one of the leaders of Hamas ... 'Forty were killed and 200 injured in just two operations,' added Mahmoud al-Zahar ... They said Hamas was more effective now it was using weapons-grade explosives instead of home-made bombs manufactured using fertiliser. They also believe the Palestinian Authority, under Yasser Arafat, has given up negotiating with Israel. 'We have the same problem now, Israel is our enemy,' said Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas.

"Interviews with four [top Hamas leaders] - a cleric, an engineer and two medical doctors - showed a leadership unyielding, determined and increasingly confident of achieving their goal, the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state.

"They are almost welcoming of the Israeli attacks in the West Bank because they believe that the military campaign will generate more recruits for Hamas. Already, the leaders say, they have more than enough recruits for suicide attacks.

"Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the 4 million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living 'in an Islamic state with Islamic law,' Dr Zahar said.

"Yassin said: 'The Palestinian people are not the same as they were in 1967', when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, 'or during the first intifada', from 1987 to 1991. 'At that time nobody knew how to make explosives. But now everybody knows, and Israel will never be stable again."'

The choices facing Australia could become far more intense than the point-scoring that currently dominates the debate over national security and national sovereignty.